Fix The Blandness Of Store-Bought Tomato Sauce With One Powerful Condiment

A good red sauce is a home cooking staple. Whether you are talking about spaghetti and meatballs, DIY pizza, or a luscious lasagna, tomato sauce carries a lot of comfort food classics. Nothing beats a homemade sauce for these applications, but that is often way too much time and effort for most nights of the week. Fortunately, there are many ways to make your jarred tomato sauce taste like homemade, and one very easy trick is simply to add a dash of soy sauce.

Tomatoes are already an umami-heavy ingredient — which is no small part of the reason why we love dishes with tomato sauce so much — but that umami is doubled with a splash of soy — and that's not even mentioning the additional layers of salty caramel flavor. Once you try this secret ingredient, you'll wonder why it wasn't standard practice around the world. The truth is, in a lot of places it is.

We might not think of soy sauce as having a place in Italian foods, but there is plenty of precedent — particularly in the Asian world — for this combo. In some cultures, it is traditional to salt foods not with table salt, but with soy sauce or fish sauce. As such, these are common ingredients in every dish, including tomato sauces meant for coating pasta. While it may seem strange, you'll know it belongs as soon you taste it (and you might just find that it becomes your new secret ingredient, too).

Other ways to improve store-bought tomato sauce

Soy sauce is not the only way to add a punch of salt and umami to your tomato sauce. Fish sauce is another simple addition that can really transform a store-bought tomato sauce. Alternatively, if you do not typically have fish sauce or soy sauce on hand, you can swap Worcestershire sauce for soy sauce to give a similar flavor boost. 

There are plenty of other small additions that you can make to a jar or can of store-bought tomato sauce to take things to the next level. Adding some fresh herbs can really upgrade your store-bought sauce, for example. It is quick and easy — especially if you are the sort of person that grows themself a nice herb garden — to chop a few herbs and toss them into the pot. Dried herbs can take a while to really release their flavor into a sauce, but fresh herbs act much more quickly. In fact, if you cook fresh herbs for too long, you risk boiling off much of the aroma, so it's best to add those chopped basil leaves close to the end. Thank goodness, right? Any excuse to speed things up a bit. 

Adding a bit of sweetness to spaghetti sauce can also be a useful trick to have up your sleeve. We tend to focus more on the savory elements with tomato sauce, but a sprinkle of sugar can also help to balance things out. Particularly when you are building such a salty umami bomb with tomatoes and soy sauce, a little sweetness can help you to get things just right.

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